


crude diagrams

by strangeness



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: F/F, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-27
Updated: 2015-12-27
Packaged: 2018-05-09 17:50:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5549786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangeness/pseuds/strangeness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Akagi name is built on mistakes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	crude diagrams

 

> _What fabrications they are, mothers.  
>  _ _Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams.  
>  _ _We deny them an existence of their own.  
>  _        
>        Margaret Atwood, _The Blind Assassin_

 

 

 

She becomes aware of gravity and of time on a Wednesday. Maya has never believed in calling anything before six o’clock “morning”, but she stands in her bathroom shortly before 5 AM with one towel wrapped around her body, and another resting on top of her head like thick, cotton hair. Just a minute before, all she had been aware of was her tardiness, but wiping away post-shower steam from her bathroom mirror affords her a revelation that lets her forget for a few minutes.

She stares into her reflection. Greeted with bleary, red eyes and mid-length brown hair—that she keeps forgetting to cut—, Maya determines that she doesn’t look her age, but younger, and she has her mother’s genetics to thank for that. Just a week ago, she had spent a Saturday night curled up in Hyuga’s basement with a bottle of imported tequila in one hand and her cell phone in the other, counting down the hours, and then the minutes until she turned twenty-four years old. 

She looks younger, there is youth in the cut of her jaw, and the fatigue in her eyes is that of a college student instead of the young professional that she is. She finds herself despising it before realizing that the moment is over. She is late, and she wonders how time can be moving too slowly and too quickly for her at once. 

She moves through her apartment with purpose, surefooted steps that would be sure to disturb any sleeping neighbours underneath her had she lived on any other floor of the walk up. Silence is something that she’s had time to adjust to since moving to Tokyo-3 to work for NERV. Three brothers have done nothing but forced Maya to live in controlled chaos and higher volumes all throughout her life, a constant that has vanished from her life. She makes up for it in stomps and in humming to herself. Quiet occasionally pervades, and it leaves her feeling uneasy.

Briefly, she wonders what she would look like with short hair—or no hair at all—when looking at her reflection in the mirror one last time as she’s about to step out. She puts it out of mind. 

 

 

 

Akagi is quiet and cold and looks her age. Maya remembers the first time she ever saw the Geofront, and how she had balked at its existence. That had faded with time in the months she had spent working for NERV, but the presence and existence of the Magi and Ritsuko Akagi fills her with both wonder and fear. 

Inexplicably, it is Akagi who takes interest in Maya, and at first, she wants to ask if she’s being mistaken for Hyuga or Aoba, but Akagi insists. They don’t talk much, and when they do it is about the science behind their work, but Maya has begun to think of her as a mentor. She didn’t mean to at first, but now all the time she spends with Akagi, the lead researcher, is a source of pride for her. 

Sometimes Maya will sit with Akagi in her office sometimes, absentmindedly twirling a pen between her fingers and watching her mentor smoke a cigarette or four. The smoke bothers Maya, but she never says anything. She takes times like that to wonder when the Angels will attack, to wonder if or when they’re all going to perish. 

“Do you know what the Magi are?” Akagi asks her once, putting out her last cigarette in her overflowing ash tray. Maya briefly wonders how many different subtle shades of red lipstick Akagi owns. The butts that litter the drab tray put a menagerie of colour on display.  
  
“A supercomputer.” Maya answers, tiredly running her a hand through her hair before pulling it taut and up and out of her face. She rarely wears her hair down, and only allows it to fall past her shoulders in the restrooms and in this office. “They’re used to assist in piloting the EVA Units, right?”

“In the simplest terms, yes.” Akagi answers her, but does not look at her. Maya watches as she shuts the monitor to her computer off, using her appearing reflection as a mirror as she reapplies her lipstick. “Theoretically, yes.” 

“There’s more, then?”

Ritsuko Akagi turns to look at her, and—something clicks with Maya—she simply knows of the fact that her mentor is a woman with dangerous secrets. There is a power to her that is weaponized and chaotic. Maya wonders how she cages it all in.  
  
“The Magi were developed by my mother.” Akagi tells her. The tone of her voice is quiet and testy; it’s the closest to uncertain that Maya has ever seen her. “It utilizes a Personality Transplant Operating System. The same concept is also used in the EVA Units.” 

“I’m saying the Magi is my mother.” Maya wonders if this is a secret, and if it’s one that she should be privy to. She wants to ask why Akagi is telling her this, but something is preventing her from opening her mouth; something is telling her that her role is just to listen.  
  
She thinks of her own mother back home, unmoving and quiet.  
  
“My mother put the three aspects of her personality into Melchior, Balthasar, and Casper. Her perception of herself as a scientist, a mother, and a woman. She divided what made her human and put it in a computer.”  
  
“A ghost.” Maya says after a while. “Your mother is a ghost, Akagi-san?”

It makes the older woman smile, if only a little. “That’s not very scientific, Maya.” When Akagi says her name, Maya feels frissons running up her limbs like ants underneath her skin. 

“It’s good that I’m not asking Melchior, then.” Maya is feeling bold, and the urge to bounce her knees to release some sort of tension is overwhelming. For the moment, she remains stolid and statuesque. “What would Balthasar or Casper say?”

“I’m not sure. She always was a mother last. Who can know?” Akagi replies, and then laughs. The sound is almost shrill and it makes both of them jump. 

 

 

 

“My name is Ritsuko,” she tells Maya one day, “so you can call me as such.” It’s flippant, and punctuated with handing off of a clipboard to a technician without a name or a face. They’re doing calibrations, and suddenly there is palpable awkwardness between them that makes even Ritsuko glance at her over the rim of her thinly framed glasses. “Maya?” She asks.

“Sorry—I understand. I will.” Maya says immediately and too quickly. Ritsuko pretends not to notice over the sounds of construction in the cage housing Unit-00 below them. The sound is a stark difference from the normal hushed tones of the hallways of headquarters, and Maya doesn’t find herself needing to stomp for the first time in a long while.  
  
“Happy belated birthday, by the way.” Ritsuko offers after a moment as she crouches down to read something off of a meter. “How old?” She asks.  
  
“Twenty-four.” Maya answers, and the way Ritsuko nods makes her feel like a child once more. 

 

 

 

Maya is the one who first sees it, and for a moment, she feels like Death itself.  
  
“There,” she points, and Aoba follows her finger. “ _Blue_.” She whispers.

 

 

 

The beginning of the end is set in a dive bar. Ritsuko wears a blazer and looks militant and entirely out of place and won’t stop buying Maya shots of jaeger. Naturally, Maya downs them and curses her status as a lightweight.  
  
“What if I’m wrong?” She speaks easy now, and Ritsuko gives her a tight smile and shakes her head just once. “But what _if_?”

“You are a talented technician with an equally talented mind.” Her mentor tells her simply. “I trust your judgement. The Third Child will be here tomorrow. I just hope it’ll be in time.” 

Ritsuko slides over another shot glass across the worn bar. Maya notes that she isn’t wearing lipstick for once before downing another shot. It sets her throat on fire. “What if we can’t convince him to pilot?”  
  
Another tight smile; Maya decides she hates it. “Call your family.” 

 

 

 

Hours later, Ritsuko has started to drink too. Wine only, and Maya notes how she has quite the expensive taste. It figures. The pity party has moved from a threadbare bar to Maya’s equally threadbare apartment. 

  
“I’ve made plenty of mistakes.” Ritsuko answers with a laugh from Maya’s couch. Maya herself sits on the floor, head resting on her knees, which are pulled up to her chest. “Treated people poorly…I’ve kissed a lot of men that I shouldn’t have.”  
  
Those words are a burn, and Maya recoils by shifting her position, stretching out. She’s never kissed a man. “I doubt it.” She argues. “Dr. Akagi makes no mistakes.”  
  
Ritsuko busies herself by swirling the remainder of her drink in her glass. “The Akagi name is built on mistakes.” She informs Maya simply, her voice wistful and absent. Maya wonders where she went.

 

 

 

“You told me to call my family.” Maya says as she is walking Ritsuko out of her apartment. She has been claiming intoxication for the better part of two hours despite not having so much of an ounce of anything stronger than alcohol since leaving the bar. Mortality awaits them both at work tomorrow, and the fight or flight response is already churning in her mind.

The battle at hand is a smaller scale, but she knows that she’ll be at NERV HQ tomorrow, win or lose, Third Child or no, so her Cold War with the woman she’s devout to seems easy in comparison. “I have no family anymore.” She says, and Ritsuko stands in the threshold of her home, simply looking at her. “They died in Second Impact.”

Ritsuko frowns, her hand coming up to cup Maya’s chin, tilting her head upwards so they’re forced to look at each other. Every cell in Maya’s body thrums with life, with an ache that isn’t foreign, but simply forgotten. She needs Ritsuko to stop touching her before she becomes a child once more. 

“The world can’t end tomorrow.” Ritsuko tells her, and her tone is so sure that Maya has to remind herself that the woman is not God. “You have so much to learn.” 

_I want to learn_ , she wants to say. _I want you to teach me_ , she wants to say. _I have so many things that I want from you_ , she wants to say.  
  
“So do you.” Maya replies, and somehow that allows the world to continue to turn.

 

 

 

The next morning, she resists the temptation to down the bottle of aspirin in her medicine cabinet to nurse the hangover she deserves. After her shower, she catches her reflection through the steam of her bathroom mirror.

  
She bunches her hair up as if to put it up into a tight bun, and instead cuts it right off using the scissors resting on her counter.  Maya drops the strands in the sink, although they stick to her skin like a reminder of her past. She doesn’t look any older in the mirror; how very much like her mother.

**Author's Note:**

> it is four in the morning, this was a poor decision, but it just happened.


End file.
